When the President Looks Like Me

One of the treats of last month’s inauguration was listening to Richard Blanco read the poem he wrote especially for that day. Blanco, a gay Cuban American, is the youngest person to present a poem at a Presidential inauguration, and his presence sent a message to young people of all backgrounds that they could stand on that stage—and sooner than they think.

Barack Obama’s election—and re-election—sends another message to young people of color, and acclaimed poet Tony Medina captures that sense of pride and possibility in his new collection for young people, The President Looks Like Me and Other Poems (Just Us Books, 2013). Medina is both Black and Latino, a combination one sees in few books for children though he represents a growing share of the country’s young people. His poems reflect these two cultural strands while embracing all of the other cultures with which he comes into contact growing up in and now living in a large city in the United States. Some of the poems explore the past—the time of Medina’s own childhood—while others embrace the present day of his readers. The poems are a rich celebration of urban life that also acknowledge the dark side of poverty, violence, lack of food and medical care, and concerns that an increasingly selfish and insular elite is closing the avenues to success for talented and hard-working people without money or connections. This political consciousness, expressed in verses such as “From a stone cold world/With so much to eat/But starving people/With canned cat food/For meat,” sets this small press published volume apart from more mainstream collections.

The President Looks Like Me is well designed for use in classrooms and afterschool programs, with an afterword that explores the various forms of poetry presented—blues poems, haiku, limericks, sonnets, odes, praise poems, list poems, and others. There are also poetry prompts, with Medina’s own examples of responses to those prompts. In all, this is a meaty volume that makes poetry both accessible and fun. And who knows? The person in Richard Blanco’s place (or 2009 inauguration poet Elizabeth Alexander’s place) twenty years from now may be someone inspired by this book!